The president-elect of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, has started a campaign to repair the serious damage done to his nation's alliance with the United States by Seoul's incumbent, President Roh Moo-hyun.

Even so, American military officers are pushing ahead with plans to reduce the number of U.S. forces in South Korea, to shift command responsibilities to the Koreans, and to bring home the headquarters of the Eighth Army and that of the 2nd Infantry Division, the remaining U.S. combat unit on the peninsula.

President-elect Lee, who is scheduled to be inaugurated on Feb. 25, told foreign correspondents in Seoul in mid-January: "For the security goals of Korea and regional stability, the alliance between South Korea and the United States will be reconstructed in a creative manner."

He said his government would exercise "pragmatic economic diplomacy" and "we will ratify the FTA (free trade agreement) with the United States at the earliest possible time." President Bush echoed that in a request to Congress in his State of the Union address Monday. There is considerable opposition to the free trade agreement, however, from vested interests both in Washington and Seoul.

Lee sent a special envoy, Chung Moon-joon, to Washington in late January to see President Bush and other senior officials. Chung sought to elicit an invitation to Lee to visit Washington and urged all he met to reverse or at least slow down a planned reduction in U.S. forces in South Korea.

Chung was evidently successful on his first mission, as President Lee plans to fly to Washington in April. But the special envoy got nowhere with his second task. American officials said months ago that by the end of last year, they would complete plans to lessen the U.S. presence in South Korea.

President Roh ran for election in 2003 on a platform that was anti-American.

Throughout his term he has disparaged the alliance and sought to restrict U.S. operations in South Korea itself and from South Korea to other areas. His policy toward North Korea appears to some Americans to border on appeasement. As a consequence, officials in the Roh and Bush governments distrust each other.

At a meeting of Korean and U.S. scholars, diplomats and other specialists in New York in November, they agreed: "There is a need to rebuild mutual trust and confidence, develop a clear and more popularly accepted rationale for the relationship, and prepare the relationship to deal with future challenges."

A critical issue has been the Roh government's demand that operational control of South Korean forces in wartime be handed from American commanders to South Korean officers. The U.S. has approved this change and both governments have agreed that it will take place in April 2012.

That date appears to have become something of a deadline for other changes.

The Combined Forces Command in Seoul now led by an American four-star general with a South Korean deputy will disappear as both peacetime and wartime command will be in the hands of the Koreans.

President-elect Lee, with the backing of some Korean military officers, had sought to delay that change, arguing that Koreans are not yet ready to handle that responsibility. Army Gen. Burwell B. Bell, the U.S. commander in Seoul, said in New York this week that the 2012 date is firm.

Moreover, U.S. officers said the headquarters of the Eighth Army, the overall U.S. Army command unit in Seoul, would move to Hawai'i by 2012. In addition, the headquarters of the 2nd Infantry Division, which has only one ground combat brigade instead of the usual three or four, will leave South Korea even though its destination has not yet been decided.

About 27,000 U.S. troops are posted in South Korea. That number will soon decline to 25,000 and keep on dropping gradually, probably to fewer than 20,000. Those troops are needed elsewhere in an Army stretched thin by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, U.S. officers contend that South Korean forces should take charge of defending their own country from their potential enemy in North Korea. Some assert that the Koreans have long shirked that duty and thus have not prepared themselves to take over the communications, intelligence and logistics essential to large-scale operations.

For that reason, U.S. officers said, units like the 1st Signal Brigade, which provides strategic and tactical communications; the 501st Military Intelligence Brigade, which gets information for commanders; and the 19th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), which is the logistic arm of Eighth Army, will remain in South Korea after 2012.

Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. His column appears weekly in Sunday's Focus section.